What are Cookies and how do they Benefit You
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites. Cookies are not programs or software. When you visit a website it stores a snippet of text from your visit, the next time you visit this text is retrieved by the website and they recognise you depending on the type of website.
So when it feels like a website knows your preferences or is showing you items based on previous searches or choices this is because the website has used a cookie to recognise you. Cookies on our website do NOT store personally identifiable information such as postal addresses, email addresses or phone numbers.
An example of a cookie in use on a website would be for example on Amazon when you do a search and then the next time you visit it remembers the search you did the last time.
Our cookies help us:
Make our website work as you’d expect
Save you having to login every time you visit the site (if you opt to be remembered)
Remember your settings during and between visits
Improve the speed/security of the site
Allow you to share articles & products with social networks like Facebook
Personalise our site to you to help you get what you need faster
Continuously improve our website for you
We do not use cookies to:
Collect any personally identifiable information (we will always ask for your express permission if we ever do collect this information but we don’t see why we ever will need to)
Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
You can learn more about all the types of cookies we use below, these fall into a few categories such as website function cookies, social media cookies, third party and advertising cookies and analytics cookies
Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser ie. Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox etc) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can disable cookies through Internet options on your browser menu at any time, however please be aware that doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
More about our Cookies
1. Website Function Cookies such as session or preference cookies – we use woocommerce to power our shopping functionality.
To keep track of cart data, WooCommerce makes use of 3 cookies:
woocommerce_cart_hash
woocommerce_items_in_cart
wp_woocommerce_session_
The first two cookies contain information about the cart as a whole and helps WooCommerce know when the cart data changes. The final cookie (wp_woocommerce_session_) contains a unique code for each customer so that it knows where to find the cart data in the database for each customer. No personal information is stored within these cookies.
Please note, if you disable these cookies our site will not function as it should – you may not be able to login for example.
2. Third party functions
Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video.
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties
3. Social Media Website Cookies
We have a Facebook pixel installed on our website which we use to remarket to you, this tells us what products you viewed and allows us to target ads to you on Facebook.
4. Anonymous Visitor & Behaviour Statistics Cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These ‘analytics’ programs also tell us if , on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.
We use:
Google Analytics – you can opt out of Google Analytics using this tool – http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/question82.htm
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of ours and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites
It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.
Here is some further information from other resources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/guides/about-cookies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/question82.htm
Here is a link to the Google Privacy Policy which covers Analytics
Here is another guide to your online options: http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/
If you have any concerns or questions you can email [email protected] and we will endeavour to respond within 48 hours.
Updated 21st May 2018